What’s on TV Saturday: ‘The Legend of Tarzan’ and ‘Planet Earth II’

Alexander Skarsgard forgoes the loincloth — the better to show off his hard-won physique — in “The Legend of Tarzan.” And “Planet Earth II,” with David Attenborough, takes nature photography to spectacular heights.

What’s on TV

THE LEGEND OF TARZAN (2016) 8 p.m. on HBO.Alexander Skarsgard swings into action as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s jungle boy, now living as Lord Greystoke in Britain before being transported to the Congo Free State on a public relations tour sponsored by King Leopold II of Belgium. But it’s all a ruse: Accompanied by his wife, Jane (Margot Robbie), and George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson), an American politician on a fact-finding mission, Tarzan stumbles into a trap masterminded by Captain Léon Rom (Christoph Waltz). “‘The Legend of Tarzan’ has a whole lot of fun, big-screen things going for it — adventure, romance, natural landscapes, digital animals and oceans of rippling handsome man-muscle,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times. And the pleasures of its old-fashioned escapades are made more enjoyable by the thoughtful, imperfect makeover the director, David Yates, has given the white-supremacy origin story.

BRIDGE OF SPIES (2015) 6:35 p.m. on Showtime. The cable network offers free viewing of this Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks tale about a New York lawyer recruited to defend a Soviet mole (an Oscar-winning Mark Rylance) in court during the Cold War and swept up in a high-stakes C.I.A. exchange for an American U-2 pilot (Austin Stowell). The “gravely moody, perfectly directed thriller,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times, is “a consummate entertainment that sweeps you up with pure cinema.”

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Baby marine iguanas.CreditBBC, via Associated Press

PLANET EARTH II9 p.m. on BBC America. That terrifying viral video of a battalion of racer snakes giving baby marine iguanas a run for their lives? It’s here in this David Attenborough follow-up to his 2006 series, which embeds with wildlife in assorted locales — islands, mountains, jungles, deserts, grasslands and even in cities. His reverent, nonjudgmental approach may seem too dispassionate to an American audience, Neil Genzlinger wrote in The Times. But “nature photography has rarely been as spectacular as it is in ‘Planet Earth II,’” which finally “invites you to be awe-struck, but also to feel as if everything is just fine in the natural world.”

What’s Streaming

CROWNIESon Acorn TV. Janet King — the Australian senior crown prosecutor, played by Marta Dusseldorp, with a lacerating tongue and even sharper investigative skills — gets a back story in this hit 2011 legal drama centered on five young solicitors.

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Jason PalmerCreditVariance Films

GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH (2010) on Sundance Now. Before “Whiplash” and “La La Land,” Damien Chazelle conjured up this black-and-white musical gem, starring Jason Palmer as a jazz trumpeter and Desiree Garcia as an untethered waitress mired in love, art and competing demands. “Visually distinctive and aurally delight,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in The Times, the film “has style to burn.”